God's Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (16 page)

Without God ultimate meaning is an illusion. French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre summed up the philosophical implications of reality without God, saying it is only a “vague dream of the possible . . . bursting like a bubble.”
¹¹
He believed that if life has no real meaning then we should face the sheer barrenness of our existence and realize that all this talk of meaning and purpose is absurd. It is the cruelest of cosmic jokes that we should feel compelled to continue this masquerade as if anything we as humans did really mattered.

Man’s search for meaning takes a tragic wrong turn without belief in God, leaving man with an existential philosophy of despair. In other words, how could meaningless, random processes produce conscious, rational creatures who are aware of meaning and purpose?

P
URPOSE
-D
RIVEN
E
XISTENCE

It’s no wonder that the best-selling book of our time, next to the Bible, is
The Purpose Driven Life
by Rick Warren. With 60 million sold and counting, it also has been translated into more than 130 languages, which makes it one of the most translated books.
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Regardless of the culture or nation, humans long for a solid sense of purpose and meaning in their lives. There is something deep in the human psyche, a yearning for significance, a desire to believe that there is more to life than simply physical survival. Yet all that naturalists offer is the bleak news of a pointless universe with no real ultimate purpose. This posture is voiced clearly by Lawrence Krauss: “The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not. The existence or nonexistence of a creator is independent of our desires. A world without God or purpose may seem harsh or pointless, but that alone doesn’t require God to actually exist.”
¹³

Krauss and his comrades bristle at the notion that atheists do not believe there is such a thing as meaning and purpose. They regale their audiences with the overwhelming passion for the pursuit of
knowledge
and truth that comes from a life devoted to science, while asserting that they don’t need God to believe in purpose or meaning. But honestly, they can only say that natural
selection has given us this trait in our
genetics
to help us survive. So something so wonderful, so indispensable to life, so vital to our mental and emotional health, was only the product of a pointless, meaningless, purposeless past. I doubt any of these guys are asked to give the pregame motivational speech at the Super Bowl or World Cup Final.

But how could those same blind, impersonal forces produce creatures who are deeply curious about the
meaning of life
? Remember, science itself rose out of the
Christian
worldview that the world was rationally understandable and could be investigated and understood because God existed.

Remember the fairy tales where the wicked witch would have a boiling pot of some magic brew that could produce any desired effect imaginable? Even people or monsters could come out of that simmering pot. The naturalist believes that given enough time, everything living can come out of a similar boiling pot of chemicals, but it’s absurd to think that love,
beauty
, morality, and meaning could develop in such a way (unless you are Billy Crystal in
The Princess Bride
). But that’s exactly what the atheist has to believe. As David Robertson pointed out in his letters to Richard Dawkins about
The God Delusion
:

First of all its presupposition and assertion/assumption that everything is chemical or the result of chemical reaction is itself an unprovable assertion. Secondly it is not an assertion that fits with the observable facts around us. Indeed it requires a great deal of special pleading before one can honestly come to the position that religion is just a chemical reaction, beauty is just a chemical reaction, evil likewise and
the sense of God also. Furthermore the logical consequences of such a belief are disastrous. We end up with the absurdity of man as God—the most highly evolved chemical reaction.
¹⁴

Is man simply a highly evolved chemical reaction? Are the feelings of love, loyalty, and devotion the same? Atheism reduces all of life down to a natural process.

T
HE
T
WO
-S
TORIED
H
OUSE

But this leaves us in a tragic place as humanity when we desperately try to assert meaning where there isn’t any. Francis Schaeffer explained this predicament by describing a two-storied house that modern man lives in. In the downstairs he lives in a world solely driven by human reason and natural forces where no God exists. But he can’t live there consistently so he makes a
leap of
faith into the second story where there is meaning and purpose, but he has no rational basis for this jump.
Existentialism
, as Schaeffer would say, is like a peg “hung in midair.”
¹⁵

This is the crisis that unbelief brings you to. Life is absurd without any meaning, so the
atheist
simply asserts that it is indeed meaningful. But what is the basis? Greg Graffin of the band Bad Religion articulates this faulty position: “However, people make a big mistake if they conclude from the anarchy of the physical world that life has no meaning. I draw just the opposite conclusion. The purposelessness of the natural world emphasizes the tremendous meaning inherent in the human world.”
¹⁶
So in the atheistic worldview:

• Life came from no-life.

• Meaning came from non-meaning.

This ultimate leap of faith is a prime example of the Nietzschean
will to power
phenomenon. Nietzsche taught that though life was meaningless, the
superman
simply asserts his own meaning by exerting his own will to push against the darkness of despair. This superman represented the next level of
human evolution
. Tragically, this is the philosophy of the Nazis who acted out this wrong idea to its fullest extent. Ideas do have consequences.

The critical point here is that humans cannot live without meaning and purpose. Though we may assert that God does not exist, we can’t do the same where values, meaning, and purpose are concerned. In essence, God is the foundation, and the meaning, purpose, and values are the building blocks set on that foundation. And no house stands without a foundation.

Because God exists life has meaning and purpose. The logical reasoning would be the following:

1. If God does not exist, life has no ultimate purpose or meaning.

2. Life has ultimate meaning and purpose.

3. Therefore God exists.

The existence of meaning and purpose is one of the many ways to clearly see that God exists. Yet you can know God exists and lose sight of the reality that He has created you for a purpose and end up in despair as well. This is why it’s so important to have a relationship with your Creator and not just an acknowledgment that He is real.

This past year I presided over the funeral of a wealthy man who
took his own life. His house was one of the most spectacular ones I’ve ever seen. The man had everything—except peace and real purpose. His family testified to dizzying lives of worldwide tours and experiences that should have brought happiness but didn’t. Though he believed in God, he lost sight of the light of His hope, and he panicked in the darkness and took his own life.

When we attach our own meaning and purpose to life, it works until those things we are trusting in and leaning on give way and collapse. The reason that we are to have no other gods before the real God is because anything we lean on other than God will let us down. His desire is for our good, not for destruction. As John Lennox said to Richard Dawkins, “Man-made gods are a delusion.”
¹⁷

God made you for a purpose. It is imbedded deep within your
genetics
as well as in every living molecule. As God told the prophet Jeremiah,

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you;
Before you were born I sanctified you;
I ordained you a prophet to the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5)

The infinite God who knows the stars by name (Psalm 147:4) knows you and desires a relationship with you. The crushing feeling of insignificance can be lifted as you look to God for the answers to the questions that science can only hint at. When you really believe God exists, your view of yourself should change dramatically. Life has real purpose and meaning—especially yours. Because purpose and meaning are throughout the universe, it is
not
a blind leap of faith to believe you were made for a purpose as well. You could say that both the atheist and the
theist are making inductive leaps. The evidence is overwhelming that you should take that step toward God instead of toward the darkness of skepticism. We were designed to receive perfect love from our Creator, worship His
beauty
and wonder, and serve as His agents eternally to steward creation. Only perfect love and an eternal purpose will fill the longings of our hearts.

M
AN
I
S
N
OT
J
UST
A
NOTHER
A
NIMAL

Beyond the philosophical and ethical implications surrounding the existence of God is the belief on the part of the naturalists that man is simply another animal, merely a product of natural selection. This picture has been marketed and promoted from the halls of the
Smithsonian
to the textbooks in high schools. This campaign has been so thorough that the belief that man is just a highly evolved primate has become a societal fact. “People today are trying to hang on to the dignity of man, and they do not know how to because they have lost the truth that man is made in the image of God.”
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But is human
macroevolution
the truth? If man was not created separately from the animals and is just an evolutionary
freak of nature
, then how can we consider ourselves special? Would there be any real transcendent meaning to our human condition other than mere biological oddities? “It is because man is made in God’s image, as Schaeffer constantly emphasised, that explained his longing for significance, and this is basic to the human condition, including the post-modern condition.”
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This is the center of the debate. Skeptics will concede that believers may have an intellectual argument for the existence of God based on things
like the fine-tuning of the universe or the inexplicable existence of sequenced information in DNA, but this is where they take their stand: human evolution.

The
psalmist
asked, “What is man?” (8:4). Is there anything special about us? Is man just another animal? In the search for significance we come to the very essence of discovering if there is a transcendent meaning to our lives. At the urging of my wife, Jody, I sent off my saliva sample to 23
and Me
to have my
DNA
analyzed and mapped. The results revealed over eight hundred others had similar
genetic
profiles and actually were distant cousins I never knew I had. More interesting, however, was a category that showed whether I was descended from Neanderthal lineage or not. There was a little artistic depiction of a Neanderthal man (with no clothes on, of course) matching the images I have seen countless times in biology books and Geico Insurance commercials. There was a small connection in my DNA to the
Neanderthals
. Thinking back over my family tree, I tried to imagine the relatives whom I might have suspected were a little odd, but this was no real help. Neanderthals were said to have become extinct over thirty-five thousand years ago, yet their DNA still lives in many of us?

We discussed this in the last
chapter
when pointing out the miracle of the
origin of life
as well as the origin of species. The
Cambrian explosion
refers to the sudden appearance of complex life in the fossil record, followed by minimal change within each species. When it comes to presentation of
human evolution
, great effort is made on the part of the naturalists to give a detailed presentation of humans and apes with a common ancestor. They will be quick to correct you if you say that humans descended directly from apes and you fail to mention the hypothesized
common ancestor, but the notion of man emerging from lower life forms, yes primates, is still their belief.

Humans did not evolve from lower life forms.
I can’t say it any plainer or be any clearer. There are many brilliant people, much smarter than me, who believe God used the grand scheme of Darwinian
evolution
to produce all of life, including humanity. These people are sincere, and I would not question their faith in God. I do believe, however, the evidence from the fossil record (as well as the other distinctions we have discussed) indicate that humanity was created both male and female, and though humans have developed and adapted, we’ve always been human. The fossils that are linked to man are conjectured by the naturalist to be our ancestors, not because of direct observable evidence. Any similarity in those fossils or in the genetic codes of chimpanzees and humans can be attributed to a common Designer, not common descent.

I am lingering on this issue because at the heart of Darwinian evolution is the tenet that man is simply another animal, no more intrinsically valuable than any other life form. The only real distinction is our advanced
evolutionary
place, due merely to the vagaries of natural selection. If there is no God and, therefore, no ultimate plan, then at best we are simply freaks of nature. As legendary
Harvard
paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould affirmed, “Moreover and more important, the pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.
Human evolution
is not random, it makes sense and can be explained after the fact. But wind life’s tape to the dawn of time and let it play again—and you will never get humans a second time.”
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